Information for Authors

The journal seeks clear and accessible contributions. Simple phrasing is preferred. Please use UK English spelling (including –ise/-ising rather than –ize/-izing) and double-check all non-English words.

Online submission
Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below please visit the online submission web site online submission web site. Instructions on submitting your manuscript online can be viewed here or via the online submission web site. Please check for an existing account before creating a new one.

Articles will not proceed to publication unless they adhere to the journal’s house-style. Authors whose work is accepted will be asked to confirm the article’s originality and, if appropriate, adherence to ethical considerations such as assurance of interviewees’ confidentiality. Authors are requested not to submit typescripts that are under consideration for publication elsewhere and to send final drafts rather than earlier versions designed to elicit editors’ judgement on the potential suitability of the MS for publication in SHM.

All articles should be in Arial font, 12 point and double-spaced. The article should be paginated throughout. Graphs and figures can be inserted in the main text. Please include a short abstract of no more than 200 words and up to 10 keywords. A statement of the author’s present position and both postal and email addresses should also be provided on a separate sheet, together with telephone and fax numbers.

1. Word limit. Articles should generally be no more than 8,000 words in length (INCLUDING footnotes and bibliography).

2. Notes and references. The journal uses an author/date/page system in footnotes. Fuller references need to be supplied in the bibliography. Footnotes should be used both to cite sources and to make any brief comments not deemed appropriate for the main text. The only exception to the rule that all quotations are footnotes is in reviews. All footnotes should spell out author/date/page in full. Op. cit., ibid., loc. cit. and similar are not generally used. Ibid. is only used when the following reference is exactly the same (author, date and page reference) as the previous reference.

A bibliography should be placed at the end of the text containing all sources cited in alphabetical and chronological order. In the bibliography, book titles should be italicised and place of publication and publisher provided, e.g. Ernst W. (ed.) 2002, Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000, London and New York: Routledge. Article titles from journals or edited volumes should be placed in ‘single quotation marks’, while the journal/volume from which it is taken should be listed in italics. Articles should include the author’s name, the date, and title of the article, the volume, and page numbers of the periodical, e.g. Lo V. 1993, ‘The Legend of the Lady of Linshui’, Journal of Chinese Religion, 21, 69-96. In the bibliography, books cited which are reprints of earlier works should have the original publication date included in square brackets after the date of the edition cited. In footnotes, however, only the date of the later edition should be given.

In the bibliography, when citing editions which are taken from a series of collected works, the date given should be the date of publication of the particular volume, followed as above in square brackets by the date of publication of the original work. The volume number should be listed.

If two or more pages are cited, please provide pp. x–y in the footnotes. Ranges of pages, or years, or any other series of numbers, are cited as spoken. Thus we have pp. 65–8, not 65-68; pp. 112—13, not 112—3; ‘sixty-five to -eight’, not ‘sixty-five to sixty-eight’.

Footnotes come after any punctuation.

E.g.: … as has been argued elsewhere.7 This is the basis …

Not: … as has been argued elsewhere7. This is the basis …

It will help us enormously and save a great deal of time if you ensure that your references accord in every detail with the examples below. For example, there should be no comma between author name and date of publication. Please put a full stop after the ‘p’ before page numbers, followed by a space before the number. There should be full stops at the ends of footnotes and references, and (ed.) should be used for one editor and (eds) for more editors.

Please use ‘single quote marks’ to identify quotations in the text and double quote marks (“…”) for quotes within quotes.

3. Sample bibliography. Basham A. L. 1990, The Sacred Cow: The Evolution of Classical Hinduism, edited and annotated by Zysk K. G., London: Rider.

Conrad L. I. and Wujastyk D. (eds) 2000, Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Kuriyama S. 1999, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, New York: Zone Books.

Nichter M. and Lock M. (eds) 2002, New Horizons in Medical Anthropology: Essays in Honour of Charles Leslie, London: Routledge.

Porter R. 1985, ‘The Patient’s View. Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, 14, 167-74.

Unschuld P. U. 1985, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

Zimmermann F. 1992, ‘Gentle Purge: The Flower Power of Ayurveda’, in Leslie C. and Young A. (eds), Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 209-23.

4. Reference examples, footnotes
1 Basham 1990, p. 13.
2 Conrad and Wujastyk (eds) 2000, pp. 10-15.
3 Kuriyama 1999, p. 100.
4 Nichter and Lock (eds) 2002, p. 3.
5 Porter 1985, p. 170.
6 Unschuld 1985, pp. 100-12.
7 Zimmermann in Leslie and Young (eds) 1992, pp. 210-12.

5. Quotations. Quotations of up to two sentences in length should be included in the main text, enclosed within ‘single quotation marks’. Quotations over this length should be given a separate paragraph. This paragraph should not be italicised, and should be indented with wider margins than the main body of the text. The paragraph should be separated from the main text by a one-line space above and below the quotation. The indented paragraph should not be in quotation marks. Quotations within an indented quotation should be in ‘single quotes’.

6. Ellipses. When words are omitted, there is a space, three dots, followed by a space. If the words omitted go over the end of a sentence, the following word must be capitalised to point out that a new sentence has started. If that word is not the one that started the new sentence in the original, a capital must be provided in square brackets. In instances of this kind, an extra dot must be added.

7. Dates and figures. Dates should be written as follows: 6 September 1972, nineteenth century, or nineteenth-century when used as an adjective. Numbers from one to nine (and first to ninth) should be spelt out. Figures 10 to 999,999 should be written in numerical form. Thereafter 1 million, 2.7 million etc. are preferred. For percentages use figures and (two words) per cent, e.g. 8 per cent. For a large number of percentages, it is permissible to use the % sign.

8. Punctuation. When an abbreviated word comes at the end of a sentence, there is only one full stop.

E.g. ... in the European countries, France, Italy, etc.

Not ... France, Italy, etc..

9. Capitalisation. Capital letters should generally be avoided with nouns unless they are derived from proper names (Maoism, Galenism) or refer to titles (International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine, the Medical Research Council).

10. Acronyms. Acronyms should be capitalised but should not be separated by dots (unless they appear in this form in a citation), for example: WHO, USA, PRC.

11. Tables, Graphs, Maps, and Illustrations. Sources for tables should be given in full detail. Copyright permission for the online and print use of tables, figures and illustrations must be obtained.

Authors proposing to use illustrative material or reprographics are asked to consult the editors at an early stage and to liaise closely with the assistant editor throughout the publication process.

12. Copyright/Offprints.
It is a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to Society for the Social History of Medicine. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. Authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the journal is ackowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press is notified in writing and in advance.

The publisher will supply the corresponding author with free online access to their paper (which can then be circulated to co-authors). The corresponding author will receive 25 printed offprints free of charge provided that the offprint form is completed and sent to OUP when the corrected proofs are returned. Additional offprints can be ordered on the offprint form.

Author Self-Archiving/Public Access Policy

For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Social History of Medicine authors have the option, at an additional charge, to make their paper freely available online immediately upon publication, under the Oxford Open initiative. After your manuscript is accepted, as part of the mandatory licence form required of all corresponding authors, you will be asked to indicate whether or not you wish to pay to have your paper made freely available immediately. If you do not select the Open Access option, your paper will be published with standard subscription-based access and you will not be charged.

For those selecting the Open Access option, the charges for Social History of Medicine vary depending on the institution at which the Corresponding author is based:

For a Corresponding author based at an institution with an online subscription to Social History of Medicine:
Regular charge - £900 / $1800 / €1350
List B developing country charge** - £450 / $900 / €675
List A developing country charge** - £0 / $0 / €0

For a Corresponding author based at an institution that does not subscribe to the online journal:
Regular charge - £1500 / $3000 / €2250
List B developing country charge** - £750 / $1500 / €1125
List A developing country charge** - £0 /$0 / €0

*Visit http://www.oxfordjournals.org/jnls/devel/ for list of qualifying countries.

The above Open Access charges are in addition to any page charges and colour charges that might apply.

Orders from UK will be subject to a 17.5% VAT charge. For orders from the rest of the EU, we will assume that the service is provided for business purposes, please provide a VAT number for yourself or your institution and ensure you account for your own local VAT correctly.

If you choose the Open Access option you will also be asked to complete an Open Access charge form online Open Access charge form online. You will be automatically directed to the appropriate version of the form depending on whether you are based at an institution with an online subscription to Social History of Medicine. Therefore please make sure that you are using an institutional computer when accessing the form. To check whether you are based at a subscribing institution please use the Subscriber Test link for Social History of Medicine.

Language Editing
Particularly if English is not your first language, before submitting your manuscript you may wish to have it edited for language. This is not a mandatory step, but may help to ensure that the academic content of your paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. If you would like information about one such service please click here. There are other specialist language editing companies that offer similar services and you can also use any of these. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services.

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